英語（二）A2
答題卡
Section I Use of English
Directions:
Read the following text. Choose the best word(s) for each numbered blank and mark A, B, C or D on the ANSWER SHEET. (10 points)
The human nose is an underrated tool. Humans are often thought to be insensitive smellers compared with animals, 1 this is largely because, 2 animals, we stand upright. This means that our noses are 3 to perceiving those smells which float through the air, 4 the majority of smells which stick to surfaces. In fact, 5 , we are extremely sensitive to smells, 6 we do not generally realize it. Our noses are capable of 7 human smells even when these are 8 to far below one part in one million.
Strangely, some people find that they can smell one type of flower but not another, 9 others are sensitive to the smells of both flowers. This may be because some people do not have the genes necessary to generate 10 smell receptors in the nose. These receptors are the cells which sense smells and send 11 to the brain. However, it has been found that even people insensitive to a certain smell 12 can suddenly become sensitive to it when 13 to it often enough.
The explanation for insensitivity to smell seems to be that the brain finds it 14 to keep all smell receptors working all the time but can 15 new receptors if necessary. This may 16 explain why we are not usually sensitive to our own smells——we simply do not need to be. We are not 17 of the usual smell of our own house, but we 18 new smells when we visit someone else's. The brain finds it best to keep smell receptors 19 for unfamiliar and emergency signals 20 the smell of smoke, which might indicate the danger of fire.
Part A
Directions:
Read the following four texts. Answer the questions after each text by choosing A, B, C or D. Mark your answers on the ANSWER SHEET. (40 points)
Text 1
When Liam McGee departed as president of Bank of America in August, his explanation was surprisingly straight up. Rather than cloaking his exit in the usual vague excuses, he came right out and said he was leaving "to pursue my goal of running a company." Broadcasting his ambition was "very much my decision," McGee says. Within two weeks, he was talking for the first time with the board of Hartford Financial Services Group, which named him CEO and chairman on September 29.
McGee says leaving without a position lined up gave him time to reflect on what kind of company he wanted to run. It also sent a clear message to the outside world about his aspirations. And McGee isn’t alone. In recent weeks the No. 2 executives at Avon and American Express quit with the explanation that they were looking for a CEO post. As boards scrutinize succession plans in response to shareholder pressure, executives who don’t get the nod also may wish to move on. A turbulent business environment also has senior managers cautious of letting vague pronouncements cloud their reputations.
As the first signs of recovery begin to take hold, deputy chiefs may be more willing to make the jump without a net. In the third quarter, CEO turnover was down 23% from a year ago as nervous boards stuck with the leaders they had, according to Liberum Research. As the economy picks up, opportunities will abound for aspiring leaders. The decision to quit a senior position to look for a better one is unconventional. For years executives and headhunters have adhered to the rule that the most attractive CEO candidates are the ones who must be poached. Says Korn/Ferry senior partner Dennis Carey: "I can’t think of a single search I’ve done where a board has not instructed me to look at sitting CEOs first."
Those who jumped without a job haven’t always landed in top positions quickly. Ellen Marram quit as chief of Tropicana a decade age, saying she wanted to be a CEO. It was a year before she became head of a tiny Internet-based commodities exchange. Robert Willumstad left Citigroup in 2005 with ambitions to be a CEO. He finally took that post at a major financial institution three years later.
Many recruiters say the old disgrace is fading for top performers. The financial crisis has made it more acceptable to be between jobs or to leave a bad one. "The traditional rule was it’s safer to stay where you are, but that’s been fundamentally inverted," says one headhunter. "The people who’ve been hurt the worst are those who’ve stayed too long."
21. When McGee announced his departure, his manner can best be described as being_____.
22. According to Paragraph 2, senior executives’ quitting may be spurred by______.
23. The word "poached" (Line 6, Paragraph 3) most probably means______.
24. It can be inferred from the last paragraph that______.
25. Which of the following is the best title for the text?
Text 2
When next year’s crop of high-school graduates arrive at Oxford University in the fall of 2019, they’ll be joined by a new face; Andrew Hamilton, the 55-year-old provost (教務(wù)長) of Yale, who’ll become Oxford’s vice-chancellor — a position equivalent to university president in America.
Hamilton isn’t the only educator crossing the Atlantic. Schools in France, Egypt, Singapore, etc, have also recently made top-level hires from abroad. Higher education has become a big and competitive business nowadays, and like so many businesses, it’s gone global. Yet the talent flow isn’t universal. These days, high-level personnel tend to head in only one direction: from America.
The chief reason is that American schools don’t tend to seriously consider looking abroad. When the board of the University of Colorado searched for a new president, it wanted a leader familiar with the state government, a major source of the university’s budget. “We didn’t do any global consideration,” says Patricia Hayes, the board’s chair. The board ultimately picked Bruce Benson, a 69-year-old Colorado businessman and political activist. The president is likely to do well in the main task of modern university counterparts: fund-raising. Fund-raising is a distinctively American thing, since U.S. schools rely heavily on donations. The fund-raising ability is largely a product of experience and necessity.
Many European universities, meanwhile, are still mostly dependent on government funding. But government support has failed to keep pace with rising student number. The decline in government support has made funding-raising an increasing necessary ability among administrators and has hiring committees hungry for Americans.
In the past few years, prominent schools around the world have joined the trend. In 2013, when Cambridge University appointed Alison Richard, another former Yale provost, as its vice-chancellor, the university publicly stressed that in her previous job she had overseen “a major strengthening of Yale’s financial position.”
Of course, fund-raising isn’t the only skill outsiders offer. The globalization of education means more universities will be seeking heads with international experience of some kind of promoting foreign programs and attract a global student body. Foreigners can offer a fresh perspective on established practices.
27. What is the chief consideration of American universities when hiring top-level administrators?
28. What do we learn about European universities from Paragraph 4?
29. Cambridge University appointed Alison Richard as its vice-chancellor chiefly because ____.
30. In what way do top-level administrators from abroad contribute to university development?
Text 3
Up until a few decades ago, our visions of the future were largely — though by no means uniformly — glowingly positive. Science and technology would cure all the ills of humanity, leading to lives of fulfillment and opportunity for all.
Now utopia has grown unfashionable, as we have gained a deeper appreciation of the range of threats facing us, from asteroid strike to epidemic flu and to climate change. You might even be tempted to assume that humanity has little future to look forward to.
But such gloominess is misplaced. The fossil record shows that many species have endured for millions of years — so why shouldn't we? Take a broader look at our species' place in the universe, and it becomes clear that we have an excellent chance of surviving for tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of years. Look up Homo sapiens in the "Red List" of threatened species of the International Union for the Conversation of Nature (IUCN) ,and you will read: "Listed as Least Concern as the species is very widely distributed, adaptable, currently increasing, and there are no major threats resulting in an overall population decline."
So what does our deep future hold? A growing number of researchers and organizations are now thinking seriously about that question. For example, the Long Now Foundation has its flagship project a medical clock that is designed to still be marking time thousands of years hence.
Perhaps willfully, it may be easier to think about such lengthy timescales than about the more immediate future. The potential evolution of today's technology, and its social consequences, is dazzlingly complicated, and it's perhaps best left to science fiction writers and futurologists to explore the many possibilities we can envisage. That's one reason why we have launched Arc, a new publication dedicated to the near future.
But take a longer view and there is a surprising amount that we can say with considerable assurance. As so often, the past holds the key to the future: we have now identified enough of the long-term patterns shaping the history of the planet, and our species, to make evidence-based forecasts about the situations in which our descendants will find themselves.
This long perspective makes the pessimistic view of our prospects seem more likely to be a passing fad. To be sure, the future is not all rosy. But we are now knowledgeable enough to reduce many of the risks that threatened the existence of earlier humans, and to improve the lot of those to come.
31. Our vision of the future used to be inspired by_______.
32. The IUCN’s “Red List” suggest that human being are_______.
33. Which of the following is true according to Paragraph 5?
35. Which of the following would be the best title for the text?
Text 4
Come on — Everybody’s doing it. That whispered message, half invitation and half forcing, is what most of us think of when we hear the words peer pressure. It usually leads to no good — drinking, drugs and casual sex. But in her new book Join the Club, Tina Rosenberg contends that peer pressure can also be a positive force through what she calls the social cure, in which organizations and officials use the power of group dynamics to help individuals improve their lives and possibly the word.
Rosenberg, the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, offers a host of example of the social cure in action: In South Carolina, a state-sponsored antismoking program called Rage Against the Haze sets out to make cigarettes uncool. In South Africa, an HIV-prevention initiative known as LoveLife recruits young people to promote safe sex among their peers.
The idea seems promising，and Rosenberg is a perceptive observer. Her critique of the lameness of many pubic-health campaigns is spot-on: they fail to mobilize peer pressure for healthy habits, and they demonstrate a seriously flawed understanding of psychology. “Dare to be different, please don’t smoke!” pleads one billboard campaign aimed at reducing smoking among teenagers — teenagers, who desire nothing more than fitting in. Rosenberg argues convincingly that public-health advocates ought to take a page from advertisers, so skilled at applying peer pressure.
But on the general effectiveness of the social cure, Rosenberg is less persuasive. Join the Club is filled with too much irrelevant detail and not enough exploration of the social and biological factors that make peer pressure so powerful. The most glaring flaw of the social cure as it’s presented here is that it doesn’t work very well for very long. Rage Against the Haze failed once state funding was cut. Evidence that the LoveLife program produces lasting changes is limited and mixed.
There’s no doubt that our peer groups exert enormous influence on our behavior. An emerging body of research shows that positive health habits — as well as negative ones — spread through networks of friends via social communication. This is a subtle form of peer pressure: we unconsciously imitate the behavior we see every day.
Far less certain, however, is how successfully experts and bureaucrats can select our peer groups and steer their activities in virtuous directions. It’s like the teacher who breaks up the troublemakers in the back row by pairing them with better-behaved classmates. The tactic never really works. And that’s the problem with a social cure engineered from the outside: in the real world, as in school, we insist on choosing our own friends.
36. According to the first paragraph, peer pressure often emerges as______.
37. Rosenberg holds that public advocates should_________.
38. In the author’s view, Rosenberg’s book fails to __________.
39. Paragraph 5 shows that our imitation of behaviors___________.
40. The author suggests in the last paragraph that the effect of peer pressure is _____.
Part B
Directions:
Read the following text and answer the questions by choosing the most suitable subheading from the list A—G for each numbered paragraph (41—45). There are two extra subheadings which you do not need to use. Mark your answers on the ANSWER SHEET. (10 points)
[A] Follow on Lines
[B] Whisper: Keep It to Yourself
[C] Word of Experience: Stick to It
[D] Code of Success: Freed and Targeted
[E] Efficient Work to Promote Efficient Workers
[F] Done: Simplicity Means Everything
[G] Efficiency Comes from Control
Every decade has its defining self-help business book. In the 1940s it was How to Win Friends and Influence People, in the 1990s The Seven Habits of Highly Successful People. These days we’re worried about something much simpler: Getting Things Done.
41. __________________
That’s the title of productivity guru David Allen’s pithy 2001 thesis on working efficiently, which continues to resonate in this decade’s overworked, overwhelmed, overteched workplace. Allen hasn’t just sold 500,000 copies of his book. He has preached his message of focus, discipline and creativity everywhere from Sony and Novartis to the World Bank and the U. S. Air Force. He counsels swamped chief executives on coping with information overload. He ministers to some clients with an intensive, two-day, $6,000 private session in which he and his team organize their lives from top to bottom. And he has won the devotion of acolytes who document on their blogs how his Getting Things Done (GTD) program has changed their lives.
42.__________________
Allen admits that much of his basic recipe is common sense. Free your mind, and productivity will follow. Break down projects and goals into discrete, definable actions, and you won’t be bothered by all those loose threads pulling at your attention. First make decisions about what needs to get done, and then fashion a plan for doing it. If you’ve catalogued everything you have to do and all your long-term goals, Allen says, you’re less likely to wake up at 3 a.m. worrying about whether you’ve forgotten something: “Most people haven’t realized how out of control their head is when they get 300 e-mails a day and each of them has potential meaning.”
43. __________________
When e-mails, phone calls and to-do lists are truly under control, Allen says, the real change begins. You will finally be able to use your mind to dream up great ideas and enjoy your life rather than just occupy it with all the things you’ve got to do. Allen himself, despite running a $ 5.5 million consulting practice, traveling 200 days a year and juggling a business that’s growing 40% every year, finds time to joyride in his Mini Cooper and sculpt bonsai plants. Oh, and he had earned his black belt in karate.
44. __________________
Few companies have embraced Allen’s philosophy as thoroughly as General Mills, the Minnesota-based maker of Cheerios and Lucky Charms. Allen began at the company with a couple of private coaching sessions for top executives, who raved about his guidance. Allen and his staff now hold six to eight two-day training sessions a year. The company has already put more than 2,000 employees through GTD training and plans to expand it company-wide. “Fads come and go,” says Kevin Wilde, General Mills’ CEO, “but this continue to work.”
45.__________________
The most fevered followers of Allen’s organizational methodology gather online. Websites like gtdindex. marvelz. com parse Allen’s every utterance. The 43 Folders blog ran an eight-part podcast interview with him. GTD enthusiasts like Frank Meeuwsen, on Whatsthenextaction. com gather best practice techniques for implementing the book’s ideas. More than 60 software tools have been built specifically to supplement Allen’s system.
46.Direction：
Translate the following text into Chinese. Write your translation on the ANSWER SHEET .(15 points)
What is making the world so much older? There are two long-term causes that will continue to show up in the figures for the next few decades. The first of the big causes is that people everywhere are living far longer than they used to, and this trend started with the industrial revolution and has been slowly gathering pace. In 1900 average life expectancy at birth for the world as a whole was only around 30 years, and in rich countries under 50. The figures now are 67 and 78 respectively, and still rising.
A second and bigger cause of the aging of societies is that people everywhere are having far fewer children, so the younger age groups are much too small to counterbalance the growing number of older people. This trend emerged later than the one for longer lives, first in developed countries and now in poor countries too.
Part A
47. Directions:
Suppose you are a librarian in your university. Write an email to the new students to
1. invite them to visit the library,
2. give your tips on how to take advantage of the library's resources.
You should write neatly on ANSWER SHEET I.
Do not sign your own name at the end of the email. Use “Li Ming” instead.
Do not write the address (10 points)
Part B
48. Directions:
Write an essay based on the chart below. In your writing, you should
1) interpret the chart, and
2) give your comments.
You should write about 150 words on the ANSWER SHEET II. (15 points)
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